<i>"The second issue is with how we manage audio sessions. If you leave the Facebook app after watching a video, the audio session sometimes stays open as if the app was playing audio silently. This is similar to when you close a music app and want to keep listening to the music while you do other things, except in this case it was unintentional and nothing kept playing. The app isn't actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake. Our fixes will solve this audio issue and remove background audio completely."</i><p>So after all the accusations of Facebook exploiting background audio to steal cycles for downloading content or tracking people's location it's just another case of Hanlon's Razor.
We (Spire, building breath tracking wearables) have an unfortunate amount of experience troubleshooting these issues. The developer tooling around measuring battery drain/energy usage is not useful for debugging this sort of thing.<p>We ended up wiring a disassembled iPhone to battery simulation hardware and are now able to measure battery drain while stepping through a debugger/pushing the phone through an integration test to identify power usage regressions.<p>Curious how other folks handle these issues.
Importantly, this explains why a number of Facebook on iOS users were reporting that the app was showing background usage even when background refresh was turned off. Many people thought Facebook was using a private API to track people when they weren't using the app. In reality, it was just a mistake. This is a great example of Hanlon's Razor [1]<p>[1] "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor</a>
It would be helpful if Apple included tracking on background time and other battery-usage metrics along with crash reporting for users that opt into it.<p>Facebook has no by-the-books way to realize some issues like this are happening, largely because iOS makes this difficult to watch.
Doesn't an iOS app have to declare that it is going to do background audio? If so, what was their original legitimate use case for having background audio?<p>Edit: Here's a link to the apple docs that show apps have to declare what tasks they will perform in the background.<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone...</a>
When I read the title I got excited because I thought that Apple had implemented some battery abstraction for iOS that gives a virtual battery to each application. Now I'm curious to know if there would be any benefit to something like that, or if it would be at all useful in any way?
I hope there's a fix soon, because I'm tired of having to force-kill the app.<p>I don't know what tipped me off that Facebook was the culprit but I was driving one day and my podcast went quiet, like a notification sound was about to happen. But nothing came and the audio stayed quiet for at least 30 seconds before I pulled over, opened the app list, and killed Facebook. Problem solved.<p>Also, coincidentally, I forgot to kill Facebook last night and when I picked up my phone this morning it was warm. Glad I remembered to leave it plugged in.
Anyone know how to disable those Facebook notifications that say "Do you know X?". Can't find it in the options at all. Feels like an attempt to get engagement.